Faculty

Profile

Lawrence Hirschfeld is Professor of Anthropology and Psychology at the New School for Social Research.

My research explores the psychological aspects of cultural life and the cultural dimension of mental life. I am especially interested in how young children come to understand and use social categories like race, gender, age, etc., particularly how children’s culture shapes the meaning of these categories for both the child and the adult.  More recently, I have launched an infant-study lab that focuses on preverbal infants' expectations about social groups and social group dynamic.  To date three sets of studies have been completed and are in the process of being prepared for submission.
 

Hirschfeld Infant Lab

Center for Research with Infants and Toddlers

Degrees Held

PhD 1984, Columbia University

Recent Publications

Books

R. Viale, D. Andler, L. Hirschfeld, Biological and Cultural Bases of Human Inference.  Lawrence Erlbaum Publ., 2006.

L. Hirschfeld, Race in the making: Cognition, culture and the child's construction of human kinds.  M.I.T. Press.  1996.

L. Hirschfeld & S. Gelman (eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Cambridge University Press. 1994.  Translated in Spanish: Cartografia de la mente: La especificidad de dominio en la cognicion y en la cultura. Barcelona: Gedisa. 2002

Articles

"Collections, collectives, and individuals: Preschoolers’ attributions of intentionality." (Sheikh, H.).  Cognition, 190, 99-104. (2019)

"The Rutherford Atom of Culture". Journal of Cognition and Culture, 18(3-4), 231-261. (2018)

"The myth of mentalizing and primacy of folk sociology."  In M. R. Banaji & S. A. Gelman (eds.) Navigating the Social World: What infants, children, and other species can teach us. Oxford University Press. Pp. 101-106. (2013)

"Seven myths of race and the young child." Du Bois Review 9 (1): 17-39 (2012).

“Children’s developing conceptions of race” in The Handbook of Race, Racism, and the Developing Child, eds. C. McKown & S. Quintana (2008)

“Can autistic children predict behavior by social stereotypes?” (with E. Bartmess, S. White & U. Frith), Current Biology (2007)

“Folksociology and the cognitive foundations of culture” Intellectica (2007)

“Culture, categorization and reasoning” (with D.  Medin, S. Unsworth), in Handbook of Cultural Psychology, eds. Shinobu Kityama & Dov Cohen (2007)

"Culture and modularity" (with Dan Sperber), In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, & S. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind. Volume 2: Culture and Cognition.  New York: Oxford U. Press. Pp.149-164. (2006)

Biological and Cultural Bases of Human Inference (with R. Viale & D. Andler) (2006).

"The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity" (with Dan Sperber), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (1), 42-46. (2004)

Media

Research cited in "How White Families Can Start to Reverse Racism," OZY (June 16, 2020)

Research cited in "If You Think Your Kids (or Babies!) Are Too Young to Talk About Race, Here's Proof They Already Do," PopSugar (June 14, 2020)